Assassin's Creed, a very fun sand box game, but isn't as jaw dropping as it once was. *NICK'S PICK*
Assassin's Creed has lots of length to it, with flags, view points, hostages, and challenges to do, and if you go through all of them, it can take you more than 10 hours. With that in mind, the missions are all the same, you go into a city, scout some information by either interrogating, listening in or pick pocketing, once information is obtained you go ask permission for the assassination then you go to kill your target, now repeat. This gameplay isn't that bad, even though its repetitive, but i really wanted more of a stealth gameplay, for example, i wanted to sneak behind my opponent, but it seems like my target had eyes behind his head and alerted the whole city. This sort of thing prevents me from taking a more intelligent and stealthy path of play.
Assassin's Creed feels more like Spider-Man in the Third Crusade, only without the swinging. The idea of going anywhere you want, is very refreshing, and fun. Climbing super tall buildings, especially historical buildings. Taking the time to climb every view point, trying to find all the flags, saving civilians feel rewarding, but not enough.
The story is executed poorly, mainly due to the fact that there is no cinematic camera direction, you can switch the camera during conversation, but they just stay in one place, and makes you want to fall asleep.
The graphics are great, cities are fully populated, and buildings afar are rendered with some details. the lighting and shadows really stand out. The game runs really smooth, until you hit the higher levels of details, but there are no unexplained stuttering, as there have been in recent PC ports. The only downside are character models, the population of cities are i can understand, since there's so many, but main characters should be better rendered, especially the faces. Only Altair looks the best.
The music is excellent, although there is only a few tracks that loop once in a while, and the voice overs are good but not great, since everyone in the story is neutral all the time, there are no characters with emotion, other than that seldom angry guy, but you cant really tell through the VO. When you run around the city, you'll hear the same phrases from civilians such as "Can I Have Some Money?!" or "Why is he doing that?" and when there are over 5 civilians to save in a city, most likely all five will say the same thing to thank you. It would have been alot better if there had been more variety of VO's.
Assassin;s Creed like the Prince of Persia series, is a "not quiet there yet" kind of game, it has too many flaws, such as repetitive game play, and lack of detail, that make this game from being surprising and succeeding the way Ubisoft would want it to.